Martin Steingesser

About the Artist

Martin Steingesser is author of three books of poems, Yellow Horses, Brothers of Morning and The Thinking Heart: the Life & Loves of Etty Hillesum, the latter also an award-winning performance performance work, Etty’s Song, based on Hillesum's journal and letters. The Thinking Heart-Etty's Song toured in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont; and in Europe, in Poland, and at the International Etty Hillesum Congress in Belgium. “His poems are ablaze with imagination,” said poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar. “A burning, tender voice,” said former Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser. An elementary school student once wrote: “He brings you over the bridge to beautiful poetry—it moves you.” He served as Portland, Maine’s Inaugural Poet Laureate, 2007-09. As a performance and teaching artist, he has given presentations and taught writing workshops for diverse audiences and groups from the Annual Young Writers Conference on the Breadloaf Campus of Middlebury College, Vermont, to the State House at the Maine Capitol. He has been teaching poetry workshops for 38 years and given the Maine Alliance for Arts Education’s 2006 Bill Bonyun Award “for exemplified talent and professionalism as an artist and contributions to arts education” and is also recipient of a Stonecoast Pierre Menard Poetry Scholarship in 2000. “Writing and presenting poems is a way I touch and make present a sense of grace I want in my life,” he says. “There are moments I love in poems I have made—when they are given, when windows, doors, walls blow off, and I am in a warm, boundless space with whoever is listening.” For a preview of his most recent book: e.issuu.com/embed.html#9201165/41933626